My goodness,
What a lot of interesting talk this query has elicited. I put my
comments on the tangential issues below. But the question remains: is
there a good institution in Portland where I can find a structured group
class on Lisp (or for that matter, Haskell etc.)? I'm hoping to hear,
"oh, call the CS department at OGI" or something of that sort.
Thank you for the suggestion of finding some mentoring, but my
motivation in finding a class is partly that I'd like to find some other
like minded folks who are in "student" mode -- team building for
entrepreneurial ventures among "woker" mode folks has been very
frustrating for me, and one of my goals is to assemble my next team.
As far as Prolog, what on Earth might I use this for? Graham wrote
Yahoo Shopping in Lisp, but would it make sense to write the Next Big
Thing in Prolog? I ultimately would like to beleive in the potential
utility of the next language I undertake.
WRT second language acquisition, I humbly submit that Ovid's link to the
web site quoting from a 1992 "debunking" of L2 acquisition
misconceptions is part of an organization advocating for education
funding, etc., and that the "myths" they cite are orthogonal to the
proposition put forth by Michael: namely, that there is a "point" at
which part of the L2 process become much harder or impossible. From my
(100-level undergrad) linguistics coursework, I recall that the specific
learning capabilities that young children have that adults lack are
those that deal with phonetics, not with syntax, etc. Specifically,
adult L2 learners are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to correct
pronunciation, and with distinguishing language-specific phonetic
subtleties. As I understand it, one learns as a child to make and
differentiate certain sounds as being lingusitically meaningful, and it
is much harder as an adult to pick up on those sounds. Think Asian
tonal languages, how northeasterners says "Mary," "merry," and "marry"
differently, or euro-vowels with umlauts and such -- the reigning notion
is that the door closes at some point on the ability to learn
effortlessly to make and distinguish these sounds.
PS -- I think Graham's point about age is not that the intellectual door
closes at 25, but that Life starts to make it impractical to be really
flexible and radical in digesting new things. Hard to devote yourself
to late night hacking when you're trying to make VP so you can send
junior to private school, etc.
--
Randall Lucas DF93EAD1
Tercent, Inc / SuperSurvey Online Surveys
http://www.supersurvey.com